This invention generally relates to audio signal identification, and more specifically to managing silence in audio signal identification.
Real-time identification of audio signals is being increasingly used in various applications. For example, many systems use various audio signal identification schemes to identify the name, artist, and/or album of an unknown song. In one class of audio signal identification schemes, a “test” audio fingerprint is generated for an audio signal, where the test audio fingerprint includes characteristic information about the audio signal usable for identifying the audio signal. The characteristic information about the audio signal may be based on acoustical and perceptual properties of the audio signal. To identify the audio signal, the test audio fingerprint generated from the audio signal is compared to a database of reference audio fingerprints.
However, conventional audio signal identification schemes based on audio fingerprinting have a number of technical problems. For example, current schemes using audio fingerprinting do not effectively manage silence in an audio signal. For example, conventional audio identification schemes often match a test audio fingerprint including silence to a reference audio fingerprint that also includes silence even when non-silent portions of the respective audio signals significantly differ. These false positive occur because many conventional audio identification schemes incorrectly determine that the silent portions of the audio signals are indicative of the audio signals being similar. Accordingly, current audio identification schemes often have unacceptably high error rates when identifying audio signals that include silence.